Monday, April 22, 2013

XenServer 6.1, Dell OpenManage and SNMP

I finally updated our productive environment to XenServer 6.1. The upgrade went without a hitch, but there are still many issues with Windows VMs and the XenTools. In the end completely removing the XenTools and reinstalling them did the trick.Anyway, this post is about Dell OpenManage and SNMP. I've found a spot-on post in the Citrix forums here - thanks Josh Phillips. Read on for the details.Those are the exact steps:

Firewall adjustments - I'm always extra extra careful when messing with iptables rules. It's just too easy to make a typo and lock yourself out. I'm much more comfortable by making those adjustements in the system-config GUI. Note: The default putty console window size is too small to show the whole dialog, at least on my XenServers. So I had to resize it before running the command.Also if window borders look weird, make sure to change Putty Translation options to UTF-8.

Run "system-config-securitylevel-tui"

Go to "Customize"

Go to the text box "Other Ports" in "Allow incoming". Append the following strings. Please note the comma!

,1311:tcpThis is to allow access to the OMSA web interface

,161:udpThis will allow incoming SNMP requests

XenServer snmpd is quite restrictive by default. In our environment it's ok to respond to all requests, read-only. We do this by adding the line "view systemview included .1" after the line "view systemview
included snmp" in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf.

Make sure you're able to log in to the web interface on https://<server>:1311. Also your XenServer host should now respond to any SNMP queries.The whole process takes less than 10 minutes, depending on your internet connection. About 200MBs need to be downloaded. The XenServer does not need to be rebooted!

Thanks - I was looking for these firewall rules.Even after applying these changes, restarting the iptables and OMSA services I still can't connect to the OMSA web interface though. Just get a 404 error. Any ideas?

Thanks so much for these tricks !Others blogs and forums were wrong and, furthermore, DELL states that tcp 1311 cannot be used on XenServer 6.1 and 5986 must be used through an other station with OpenManage installed ! Your solution was simple and works at the first attempt.